Fatherhood

Year 14, Day 174 - 6/23/22 - Movie #4,178

BEFORE: The Summer Rock and Doc Block is ALMOST here, just one more narrative film and then we'll kick things off tomorrow, just in time for Friday and the weekend.  This was my back-up film for "Father's Day", in case I couldn't land "The Father" on the right day, but I did.  Now I could save this one for next year, but I don't want to wait that long, plus I'm not completely sure if I'll be able to link to it again.  I've got the linking in my favor right now, I have the opportunity so I'm going to just take it. 

Frankie Faison carries over from "Freejack". 

THE PLOT: A father raises his baby girl as a single dad after the unexpected death of his wife who died one day after their daughter's birth. 

AFTER: Yeah, this is a bummer of a film in many ways, it's about a man recovering from the death of his wife and trying to find the right methods of raising his young daughter, plus managing a job and a couple of friends, and eventually something akin to a social life.  Hey, it's not easy, if it were then anyone could do it, right?  Wait, maybe they can...

The extra wrinkle here is that Matt, the lead character, never really had a father figure, he was raised by a single mom - the explanation given is that his father had other children from other baby mamas.  Fortunately, this has just made Matt extra determined to give his daughter what he didn't have.  Those plans also included co-parenting with his wife, but a medical issue shortly after giving birth ruined those plans.  (Not really a spoiler, the film opens with Matt's wife's funeral...)

Matt's determined to stay in Boston and keep his job, rather than move back to Wisconsin and let his mother and in-laws help raise young Maddy.  I guess that's a good move?  Maybe there's no right or wrong here, people are going to do what they want to do, or what they need to do, or maybe what they have to do.  I don't know, I don't feel the need to have kids so I've never been in this situation. It sucks that Matt's wife died, but that's something that nobody really tells you about getting married, that there are no good ways for it to end, and it has to end at some point, if you think about it.  Being the one who's left rather than the one who dies sucks too, I guess it's better than dying but it probably doesn't feel like it? 

Still, the film presents more ups than downs, once Maddy is out of diapers and can carry on a conversation. Days in Boston Common, riding on the swan boats. Poker games and birthday parties, sleepovers (both the child and the adult kind) and sharing ice creams.  There are dust-ups and controversies at school, but most can be easily solved by Matt just driving away quickly and ignoring the problems - until there's an accident on the playground, and Matt has chosen that same day to sleep in with his new girlfriend, and this casts doubt on whether he's ready to date again and risk taking his eye off of his daughter.  But eventually the balance seems to be restored, and life's progress is made, and there's room in Matt's life for both a daughter and a girlfriend.  

You can tell that Kevin Hart REALLY wanted to work in some stand-up comic-like routines, like he's got this whole breakdown of what you find in kids' diapers.  New parents can probably relate, but it's all alien to me, thank God.  Dealing with difficult baby car seats, strollers that are hard to fold up, there's a lot for a comedian to work with here, but this isn't really a comedy, not first and foremost, anyway.  And Maddy raging against the dress-code machine at a parochial school is probably a battle that hundreds of trans and non-binary kids are waging across the country right now, best of luck to them, I guess.  If a girl doesn't want to wear a skirt or a boy does, who cares?  It really doesn't affect me in the slightest, so fight the powers that be, kids. 

Also starring Kevin Hart (last seen in "Death at a Funeral" (2010)), Melody Hurd, Alfre Woodard (last seen in "Miss Firecracker"), Lil Rel Howery (last seen in "Judas and the Black Messiah"), DeWanda Wise (last seen in "Precious"), Anthony Carrigan (last seen in "Bill & Ted Face the Music"), Paul Reiser (last seen in "Horse Girl"), Deborah Ayorinde (last seen in "Harriet"), Teneisha Collins, Thedra Porter, Holly Gauthier-Frankel (last seen in "On the Basis of Sex"), Julie Trépanier (ditto), Ellen David (last seen in "A Walk on the Moon"), Julian Casey, Anne Day-Jones (last seen in "The Hummingbird Project"), Maria Herrera (last seen in "Bad Santa 2"), Linda Joyce Nourse (ditto), Anthony Kavanagh, Puja Uppal, Marco Ledezma, Sorachny Tan, Achilles Montes-Vamvas, Alice Tran, Rachel Mutombo. 

RATING: 6 out of 10 ice cream flavors